All business
today depends on data networks, whether you are extracting commodities from the
earth or are the world leader in e-commerce and cloud computing services. With
this reliance on data, any service interruption or downtime is painfully expensive
in terms of money and brand damage: both your current operations and your long
term business reputation depend on understanding, remediating, and preventing
outages.

With the right IT tools you can
automatically map your network and have a snapshot of what is in existence. This
is unfortunately not sufficient to diagnose, repair, and prevent future
outages. Your organization needs to know who, what, when, where, and why the changes
that led to the outage occurred and you need that information immediately, not after
days of a costly and slow paper and SharePoint search.

Current network and datacenter
management tools are tactical and stateless, with paper and human based
processes used for strategic concerns. This not only creates a slow information
analysis loop but offers many opportunities for undocumented information loss
and hoarding – decreasing your organizational awareness.

An August 2013 outage of a
large ecommerce operator was estimated to cost $1,104 per second, or just under
$2.7M for the 40 minute outage. Typical responses to prevent business
interruption are to over-invest in IT resources as a form of self-insurance
just as traditional capacity planning relied on large inventories to keep the
supply chain running. The required excess investment can grow quickly, damaging
your organization’s flexibility and reducing measures of financial health such
as ROIC. Just-in-time manufacturing cuts back on inventories at all steps of
the manufacturing chain by relying on increased availability of high quality
information and higher quality service from suppliers and internal processes. In
a similar fashion, instant access to accurate information about your network
and datacenter environment allows you to do more with less and maintain a
reduced investment in IT infrastructure through faster analysis, remediation,
and prevention of failures.

When your business runs on
information, you need instant access to data about your critical
infrastructure. LightMesh’s Living Documentation rapidly gives you the insight
that you need, using the limited details available in an outage. LightMesh enables
front-line support personnel to deliver the detailed problem analysis expected
from subject matter experts faster than they could identify the relevant expert.
This keeps users satisfied by providing details about an outage in progress and
accelerates your organization’s recovery speed.